Translingual Russian fiction: From Vladimir Nabokov to Olga Grushin

The new millennium has seen the publication of poetry and prose fiction by a new generation of Russian émigrés, a remarkable number of whom have made their literary debuts not only beyond the borders of their country of birth, but in languages other than Russian. This lecture by Dr Julie Hansen (Uppsala University) will examine the phenomenon of literary translingualism in contemporary Russian prose fiction in relation to previous generations of Russian émigré writers. In particular, translingual aspects of Olga Grushin’s novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov will be analyzed against the background of Vladimir Nabokov’s anglophone novels.

Dr Julie Hansen is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at the Department of Modern Languages and Research Fellow at the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has published articles and book chapters on Russian and Czech modernism, exile literature, translingual literature, translation, and the theme of memory in literary fiction. She is co-editor of Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature (Rodopi 2013) and a forthcoming special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies devoted to translation in Russian contexts. She is currently writing a book, funded by a research grant from the Swedish Research Council, which applies memory theory in interpretations of recent novels depicting the Communist period in Central and Eastern Europe.